10 Mint.com Alternatives – Money Apps Fresher than Mint dot com

Mint was a great personal finance tool when it was released but now many competitors have it outclassed.

When Mint.com first arrived on the scene, it was a revelation.

Here's a free service that would aggregate all of your credit card spending and take away one of the biggest time sucks in responsible money management. In one fell swoop, you had yourself a budget just by linking up your financial accounts.

Sure, there were initial hiccups. Categorization was a pain, the tools around managing your budget were raw, but Mint.com grew itself from a disruptor of Quicken to a full-fledged competitor. So much so that Intuit would buy Mint.com in 2009 for $170 million, shut down Quicken Online, and sell Quicken to another company.

It's been nearly eleven years since Mint.com's launch in March 2006. In that time a lot has changed. A new crop of startups, Mint alternatives if you will, built on fresh new technology and an eye to disrupt the once-disruptor.

If you're looking to move on, you might find your next favorite from this list!

Best of the Best

Personal Capital is our Editor's Pick as the best Mint alternative because they do the best job capturing your finances holistically. It has the best suite of investment tools available plus a robust budgeting system too. And it's free.

Hands down the best budget transition software available – it's more than just a tracker. They have these four “rules” that help change your relationship with your budget. It's a methodology on top of a tool.

The grandfather of personal finance management software, Mint.com was going to be the Quicken killer. And it did because Intuit bought Mint.com, shut down Quicken Online, and sold it to a private equity firm.

EveryDollar is a budgeting tool created by the Lampo Group, the parent compnay of Dave Ramsey. It's a zero-based budgeting tool, gorgeous, but it's free if you don't need automated transaction downloads. Otherwise, it's $99 a year.

The tl;dr on why I switched was that Personal Capital has a suite of investing related tools that Mint simply doesn't. I was less interested in the expense tracking features and more interested in getting a better handle on where my investments were, whether I was doing it right, and Mint wasn't cutting it anymore. With Mint, I feel like you're looking backwards. With PC, I feel like I have a better idea of where I'm going; if that makes any sense.

Like Mint, and many of the alternatives on this page, Personal Capital is free.

Mint is a powerful tracker but if you want to really get a handle on your budget, you need to be looking forwards and not backwards. You Need a Budget, also known as YNAB, is great for budgeting for this very reason because it relies on zero-based budgeting and projecting your budget forward.

YNAB focuses on four rules – Give Every Dollar a Job (ie. zero-based budgeting), Embrace Your True Expenses, Roll With The Punches, and Age Your Money – which helps you take what you're doing now and put it in a framework that sets you up for financial and budgeting success into the future.

YNAB has a $5 monthly fee ($50 if you pay annually) after an initial 34-day free trial.

Here's a great video (produced by YNAB) about the latest version of the software plus a discussion of the philosophy behind YNAB:

Need a budget but hate the idea of budgeting? Or just want to get the most out of YNAB? Check out this course – Budgeting for Budget Haters. For a limited time, we've secured a $50 discount to the regular price!

If you prefer taking everything in-house and tracking your budget with a spreadsheet, Tiller is the only option on the list that lets you do that. With Tiller, you put your budget into a Google spreadsheet and they do the work of pulling your transaction data from your various financial institutions.

Founded in 2015, it's the only service that will sync your financial transactions into a completely customizable spreadsheet. It's not free though, it's $5 a month, but you get access to a ton of templates to get your spreadsheet started. (our review of Tiller)

Status Money is relatively newer cloud-based budgeting tool that introduces a bit of the social element – you can compare almost every aspect of your finances against your peers. You connect your accounts, just as you would with many of the alternatives on this list, but then you can pick different cohorts to compare yourself against. You get to pick whatever demographic characteristics you want from your age range, income range, location, credit score, housing status and more. They can take a guess but you can fine tune.

It offers all of the tracking functionality of these other tools, is free, and the comparison adds another layer that can help inform you and your decision making.

If putting your data into the cloud worries you and you thought Quicken might be the answer, I have bad news – Quicken puts your data in the cloud now too. But like everyone else, they have bank level security so it shouldn't be too much of a worry.

One thing that Quicken does offer that these other services don't is the ability to set up bill pay, which works well for some of those smaller banks that don't offer it though it comes with a fee. It also pulls your home value information via Zillow, if that is important to you.

Quicken is a software application you purchase (starts around $30 for the Starter Edition but quickly goes up) and downloads to your computer (or mobile device).

PocketSmith

PocketSmith is a fully featured budgeting tool that leans on calendards and the idea of “event-based budgeting.” Rather than viewing your transactions strictly as a ledger, the approach uses a calendar and tracks recurring expenses alongside one-time transactions to give you a better understand of your spending. It's a novel approach to budgeting and could be helpful for those who are more visual.

PocketSmith has a free option that makes you manually import transactions, 12 budgets, 2 accounts, and projections for 6 months out. Premium ($9.95/mo) will get you automatic transaction importing, unlimited budgets, 10 accounts and 10 years of projections. Super ($19.95/mo) gives you unlimited accounts and 30 years of projections.

EveryDollar is a budgeting tool affiliated with Dave Ramsey (Lampo Group) and works off the principle of zero-based budgeting. It's a very beautiful looking app, available on iPhone and Android, and you have the option of using the free version of the paid Plus version ($99/year).

The big difference between the free version and the paid version is that the paid version has phone support and automated transaction imports/downloads (this is a huge difference). So unless you pay, you have to manually enter transactions.

You may be surprised to know that MoneyDance is one of the very few personal finance tools that does not upload your data to the cloud. They offer the ability to link accounts online for automatic transaction updates or you can do everything manually.

It was lauded by the Washington Post as being a solid contender to Quicken (and thus Mint) and they offer a free trial plus a 90 day money back guarantee.

PowerWallet is an online money management tool that has been around since 2008 and is very similar to Mint. One of the big differences with PowerWallet is that rather than just being a budgeting tool or expense tracker, it does a little bit more to help you save.

First, there are Groupon-like offers and deals tailored to your spending. So at least the advertisements are tailored and maybe you can save a few bucks. They also award you points for good behavior, like adding accounts or logging in every day. These points are used in sweepstakes where you can win prizes. No one else offers rewards for good behavior!

One big negative – no mobile app. PowerWallet is free.

CountAbout

CountAbout was built to solve the headaches of Quicken users and was founded in July of 2012. It is one of the few personal finance apps that can import data from Quicken and mint, which makes a transition to this app much less painful if you're a data junkie. Unlike Mint, it's not free but the price point is very affordable – $9.99 per year for the Basic product and $39.99 per year for the Premium. (the main difference is that Premium supports automatic downloading of transactions, Basic does not)

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About Jim Wang

Jim Wang is a thirty-something father of two who has been featured in the New York Times, Baltimore Sun, Entrepreneur, and Marketplace Money.

He can show you the philosophies, tools, strategies and methods he used to become financially independent and free to pursue what was important.

One of his favorite tools is Personal Capital, which enables him to manage his finances in just 15-minutes each month. They also offer financial planning, such as a Retirement Planning Tool that can tell you if you're on track to retire when you want. It's free.

He is also diversifying his investment portfolio by adding a little bit of real estate. But not rental homes, because he doesn't want a second job, it's diversified small investments in a mix of properties through RealtyShares (Fundrise if you're not an accredited investor). Worth a look and he's already made investments that have performed according to plan.

All opinions expressed here are the author's and have not of any other entity including but not limited to banks, credit card issuers, hotels, or airlines. This content has not been reviewed, approved, or endorsed by any entity included within the post.